Mysticism and Paraguay

I'm not really sure why, but this has been an incredibly busy semester for me. It seems that every semester is frantic but this time around it's been really frantic. I'm usually in my office no later than 6:30 am (more often I arrive between 5:30 and 6) and I'm here until 4:30 pm at the earliest and generally until 5:30. That's a lot of hours and I don't know where the time goes. So, it doesn't make any sense for me to start attending more campus lectures and being more involved with extracurricular activities. But then again I figured the appealing thing about teaching at a university is, well, being at a university and actually learning something every once in a while. So, in addition to the Brian Greene lecture this week (see previous post) I also attended lectures on Islamic mysticism and Paraguay (that's two separate lectures, by the way).

Jad Hatem is a Catholic professor of Philosophy who teaches in Beirut, Lebanon (he had me right there!). He was at BYU giving a series of lectures, including one entitled "The 3 Nephites, The Bodhisattva, and the Mahdi: the 3 Nephites as a Paradigm Context of Comparative Religion" (okay, so English is definitely not his native language, but that may be the best title of a lecture I'll see all year). I missed that particular lecture (darned teaching assignments!) but I did catch his lecture entitled "Pure Love in Islamic and Christian Mysticism." I'd be lying if I said it was outstanding: it was somewhat scattershot. For instance, He would start to give us a typology of the three kinds of love, get through two, and then go off on a tangent and never come back, at least as far as I could tell (for instance, there is "simple love," which aims at possession of the beloved; "pure love," which does not seek possession, and "your-guess-is-as-good-mine-love"). But he did have some illuminating stories to tell from Islamic folklore (don't ask me for the details: I was too far away to read the board he would write the names on). He apparently founded a center in Lebanon dedicated to French Christian philosopher Michel Henry, who I've begun to look into as well.

Yesterday I attended a lecture by James Spalding, the Paraguayan ambassador to the US. Now, you'd think there's only so much you could say about a little country like Paraguay and it struck me that Mr. Spalding may often find himself alone by the punchbowl at gatherings with ambassadors from other countries. But in good diplomatic fashion, he was able to make Paraguay sound like a fascinating place which has got itself on track politically and economically. The real story, which he didn't tell and which I'm willing to bet his audience was hoping to hear, was how someone so obviously gringo-looking and -sounding got to be the ambassador for Paraguay (his college degrees were from US universities, which is common enough among the Latin American intelligenstia. But his last name and his ethnicity seemed as whitebread as a native Kansan). Some things will just have to remain a mystery. But, seriously, how great is it that I have a job where I get to attend lectures on Paraguay and String Theory and Islamic Mysticism in one week?